1. Technical Field
The present disclosure is directed to systems and methods for estimating survey completion feasibility and/or survey completion timeframes based on associated survey parameters.
2. Background Art
Organizations are typically interested in obtaining valuable customer insight to assist in development of products and/or services, determine whether customers are satisfied, test advertising concepts and/or website effectiveness, and the like. In some instances, organizations obtain valuable customer insight using surveys and/or other market research techniques. For example, online web-based surveys provide organizations with an efficient environment for quickly reaching their target audience. Web-based surveys can allow organizations to view survey results as they become available. For example, when a respondent completes a survey, the respondent's answers to the questions in the survey can be processed and/or viewed by the organization that solicited the feedback.
Survey hosting sites can provide a central location for survey distribution and can maintain a pool of respondents for responding to the surveys that are maintained at or coordinated by the site. Prior to issuing a survey, the organization interested in obtaining customer insight may wish to limit certain parameters for the survey to be issued in order to obtain a more valuable result. Generally, the organization may wish to limit the survey participation by a target country, a desired number of completes and/or a list of targets. The survey participation may further be limited or guided by generic demographic attributes of the desired survey participants. For example, an organization may be interested in obtaining a specific number of completes to a survey based on survey participant location, age, sex, etc. In addition, the organization may wish to more specifically limit the parameters for survey participants, for example 20% men and 80% women. Such survey parameter limitations may provide some benefit to organizations interested in determining, for example, product appeal in a specific location, to a specific age group and/or to a specific sex.
When organizations create or establish applicable survey parameters for survey participants, it would be highly desirable for a survey hosting site to be able to determine whether it is feasible for the survey hosting site to create such survey and obtain the results based on the specified parameters. It would be also be highly desirable for a survey hosting site to be able to generate an estimate as to the completion rate of a given survey based on the survey parameters. For example, an organization may create survey parameters which are so limited that the pool of respondents available to or known by the survey hosting site will be insufficient to obtain the requested responses to the survey within a desired timeframe or, in the worst case, at all.
If a survey hosting site were able to detect and/or project the non-feasibility of performing a survey based on proposed survey parameters (either within a prescribed timeframe or over any timeframe), the survey hosting site may be able to report the non-feasibility to the organization, which in turn may reduce the limitations of the survey parameters to create a feasible survey or take other corrective action.
In addition to maintaining a pool of respondents, survey hosting sites also typically provide a central location for maintaining and distributing surveys. Although a survey hosting site may maintain a large number of surveys, it is generally the case that only a specific amount of surveys may be active at one time. Indeed, by limiting the number of active surveys at a given point in time, the survey hosting site may be better able to ensure that surveys initially created obtain their required responses based on the specified parameters prior to issuing further surveys, thereby placing primary focus on those surveys issued first until all of the specified parameters and completes are obtained. The maximum number of surveys that may be effectively maintained in an active state at one time may be referred to as a “saturation level”.
In view of the foregoing, a need exists for an ability to estimate survey feasibility, i.e., a system or method that would effectively estimate the feasibility of a given survey based on certain parameters of the survey and/or estimate the projected completion rate of the given survey. A need also exists for system(s) and/or method(s) for effectively identifying and/or estimating saturation levels. Further, a need exists for system(s) and/or method(s) that are effective to control, delay and/or refrain from the initiation of one or more new surveys that may be held in a queue based on such estimated saturation levels. Still further, a need exists for system(s) and/or method(s) that are adapted to examine the queue in a first in, first out (“FIFO”) order and, if the amount of active surveys is below the saturation level, activate one or more new surveys so as to operate at or in close proximity to the saturation level.
These and other needs are addressed by the systems and methods of the present disclosure.